ELI5: If Israel is where Jewish people originated, why do the majority of them appear European in genetic origin?

I know there have been many questions asked about the Israel/Palestine situation. However most of them are about the politics.

Back to my question. I have a vague understanding of the biblical history and of the formation of Israel. However I don't understand why they now appear European. Are they genetic descendants of the original Jewish people? Were they originally more genetically similar to people who live in the wider middle east? If so was it these people who moved to Europe and bred to become what we now recognise as a Jewish/Israeli person?

Disclaimer: I've tried to make this question as straight forward as possible and not loaded. However I'm aware that there are a lot of sensitivities around this issue that I probably don't know or understand. If I have offended anyone, I apologise, please let me know and if necessary I will edit accordingly.

The Israelite tribes originated thousands of years ago in the region that today encompasses Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Sinai, and Egypt. The original Kingdom of David was founded in the area that is today Israel, but this was actually many centuries after the Israelite tribes emerged as a coherent cultural group with their own Jewish religion.

The Kingdom of David didn't last for very long though. It was conquered many times over, by the Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Macedonians, and finally the Romans. Jewish people from ancient Israel began scattering all over the world in a diaspora. Two major groups of Jews in diaspora can still be identified today.

The Sephardi are Jews that remained in the middle east and re-settled in other parts of the middle east, such as Iraq, Jordan, and in particular the countries of North Africa along the Mediterranean coast. They made it as far West as Morocco and many passed in to Spain during the Moorish conquest of Spain.

The Ashkenazi went North. These are the Jews that settled in Russia, and in Eastern Europe, and eventually Western Europe. Most of the Jewish people in the United States are Ashkenazim that emigrated from Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

As you might expect, Jewish people living in diaspora don't completely isolate themselves and there is inevitably intermarriage and mixing. Sephardi people look middle eastern. Ashkenazi people look European.

This is wrong, including many of the other similar answers in this thread. A multitude of genetic studies confirm that modern Jews (both Ashkenazi and Sephardic) are actually significantly distinct from European populations genetically, and have maintained their ethnic identity:

Y DNA studies tend to imply a small number of founders in an old population whose members parted and followed different migration paths.[63] In most Jewish populations, these male line ancestors appear to have been mainly Middle Eastern.

Subsequent studies carried out by Feder and al confirmed the huge portion of non-local maternal origin among Ashkenazi Jews. Reflecting on their findings related to the maternal origin of Ashkenazi Jews, the authors concludes "Clearly, the differences between Jews and non-Jews are far larger than those observed among the Jewish communities. Hence, differences between the Jewish communities can be overlooked when non-Jews are included in the comparisons.

The reason why Jewish people appear European is actually quite simple and surprising: because many semitic peoples of that area (the Levant) simply did look European. Simply put, there area other ethnic groups that "look European", but aren't European at all. Look at the Kurds, Iranians, even many Iraqis and Syrians could pass for European. It is simply a Euro-centric belief that if you have a light complexion you must be of European ethnic origin.

Which I do not deny. I was simply explaining that there have been other genetic contributions to the pool that account for some of the phenotypes mentioned earlier. Many of them, themselves, make the claim of descendancy from Alexander and/or his army.

Also: any migration North before the advent of modern nutrition creates a natural selection for lighter colored skin since it allows for increased vitamin D absorption in latitudes with less sun exposure. Vitamin D is a critical factor in successful pregnancies, so to some extent that likely happened as well.

to piggy-back on this, even a very small rate of population mixing will have noticeable affects on appearance over many generations, and ashkenazi jews are often significantly darker than you'd expect for people in eastern europe.

In Hebrew, "Sephardi" means Spanish or from Spain, while "Mizrahi" means Eastern or from the East. Theoretically, Sephardi jews are jews whose ancestors fled Spain during the 1492 expulsion. Many of these Sephardis settled in north Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe (Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece etc.); it is possible that Mizrahi jews were already present there when the Sephardis arrived. In modern Israeli society there is no divide between Mizrahi and Sephardi, they are interchangeable (unlike Sephardi and Ashkenazi, which have different religious customs etc.).

Judaism is the name of the religion. 99% of Jewish people are also of Hebrew descent. Within the Jewish community we use the term "Jewish" to mean both the faith and the ethnicity. There are very very few converts to Judaism and the religion does not seek out converts. It is passed along by matrilineal descent almost exclusively, which is very much a characteristic of an ethnicity.

99% is an incredible overzealous number to throw out like that. I live in an area with a rather large Jewish community, and of the dozen i know personally, none can trace their lineage to Hebrews/Israelites.

From my Jewish roommate "The only way for that to even be theoretically true would be for all Jewish people to be associated with Israel and most Jews, as well as a few other religions would have a serious problem with that. When people ask my ethnicity, i'm Russian. If they ask my religion, i'm Jewish. No different from someone else being Irish and Catholic, or Malaysian and Islamic."

The majority of them appear European because there was a mass emigration of Jews away from Judea/Palestine about 2000 years ago. Between ~60 BC and the formation of the modern nation-state of Israel, the Jews did not really have a homeland and so lived in various other concentrations.

People who live in the middle east now don't necessarily look like the people who lived there then. Whole populations can be supplanted over time. look what happened to the 'red skin' native americans who were replaced by an entirely new population. The whole region of central Asia to india and Egypt used to be ruled by Greek kings up until 1700 years ago. And the definition of 'whiteness' tends to shrink along with the idea of 'what is Christendom Europe?' well those boundries extended well into the middle east until the Arab conquests around 1300 years ago. And even if you travel in areas far outside Europe today; places like Armenia, kazhakstan, and east of the Caspian sea, you will still see people with white skin even they aren't considered 'culturally white'.

TL:DR population movement is very active and dynamic over history. whole populations replace each other sometimes. it happens.

There are many different types of Jews, the ones you are referring to are the majority worldwide but overwhelmingly the majority in the United States and Western Europe. They are called Ashkenazi Jews. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews

The fascinating thing about their history is that no one truly knows where they came from. The most commonly accepted theory is that they somehow migrated from Israel around the 7th Century from Byzantine Palestine, possibly to the Caucuses and later to Central Europe and beyond.

Despite living in Europe for as long as 1,200 years, there is not much genetic evidence of lots of intermarriage among Ashkenazi Jews and ethnic Europeans. I believe what you may consider to be "European" features could be in fact Eastern Mediterreanean features-- somewhere inbetween what you'd consider common Western European features and "Middle Eastern" features.

Interesting, hadn't heard about the 7th century emigration before. The Romans took ~500,000 Jews as slaves when they destroyed Jerusalem. Wonder if those slaves contributed at all to later Jewish communities in Europe.

“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation... but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”

-Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

The Jews have changed over the many years we have been away from home. Interbred with other peoples in other places. Took a few genes from here, a few from there. Paled out a bit. But we're still the same Jews, we've just changed gently over time, but we're still pretty good Jews, y'know.

In the context of the time period 1948, many ethnic/national groups were clamoring for independence and MANY in the world did get it, and many to this day try to achieve it. Nationalism as a political force really came into being after World War I in particular. Many of the Eastern European nations today were formed out of this ethnic nationalis. Italy united itself as did Germany in the name of ethno-nationalism even earlier in the mid 19th century. I think Jewish nationalism has a historical much more needed aspect seeing how European society in general would not fully accept Jewish minority rights and Jewish self determination is a key to our prevention of another genocide or persecution which is not out of the realm of reason considering our history.

The Holocaust is not a " Card". To construe such a major historical event as such is rather despicable when discussing Jewish History and why a Jewish state is of importance. The countries did not exist. Ethnic groups that would form the territories of the modern nation states of eastern europe resided on the land and inhabited it but the borders were very different and they were under various empires whether it was the Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian, or German. The native americans have been granted a lot of self autonomy in recent years. Also, the idea that the Holocaust was merely the result of one individual is so out of line and so unhistorical I really do wonder if you have studied the history of the Holocaust and the history of Jews at all?

I refuse to comment on your posts any further after I heard " rather appropiate"..You have very clearly not studied the history of the time period or even know the basics to have any discussion on this..and I am getting more and more of the sense that you are trying to justify racist beliefs and possibly you are one yourself. Your intrepretations of the time period are so off based and untruthful that its meaningless to go further here.

Jewish settlements has NOTHING to do with this thread, hence why you're being downvoted. Take your Israel/Palestine conflict somewhere it's relevant. OP asked nothing about the legitimacy of jewish settlements on the West Bank. Why does this thing happen on every thread that has the word "Jew" or "Israel" in it?

Pretty sure it still has NOTHING to do with what OP asked. He even mentions it in the first two sentences. He asked nothing about politics. Go spout your anti-Israel anger somewhere else please. Have a good evening.

OP didn't ask his question in a vacuum, and it doesn't take high logical reasoning to infer as to why he asked it. This may be a leap (using my logic again) but maybe this discussion keeps coming up because people are sick of zionism and the blowback in causes.

While many people follow the usual historical explanation of the Jewish people's exile by the Romans around two thousand years ago, as I am sure you have read by now, there are also other theories. These are less popular, and I myself don't know what to make of them.

Now, theoritcally speaking, if the only way of being Jewish is being born a Jew, and if Jews only married other Jews then they should have kept their appearance. But that was not the case. Many Jewish sects/tribes actually converted non-Jews to Judaism. There was a Jewish Kingdom in the Yemen that lasted for around 150 years, and many in the Yemen who were not Jews became Jews.

The European Jews you speak of are also mixed. Of course you have the Sephardim who are mainly in Spain and Portugal - some have moved to Austria (Spinoza, a famous philosopher is one of them), and some have moved with the Muslims back to Morocco after the reconquista (re-conquest of Spain by Christian forces). But the more unpopular theory is that there was a Kingdom in the Caucaus region South of Russia known as Khazaria. The Khazarian royalty was said to have also converted to Judaism and their subjects were obliged to with them.

Another even more unpopular notion is that no exile actually took place and the spread of the Jewish people wasn't just through breeding, but conversions also. Mass exiles were not usual under the Roman Empire, but mass slaughter and revenge apparently was. And after the fall of Rome, and following that Byzantium the Muslims came and some speculate that some Jews converted to Islam.

I wouldn't say that the majority of Jews appear European. For one, there is a rather large group of Jews, called the Mizrahim that are Middle Eastern no matter how you look at it; they never left the Middle East to begin with. Even if we're just talking Ashkenazi Jews though, I still don't think that most of them look European.

To be fair, there are definitely some Jewish people that do look entirely European, their families either did a lot of intermarrying or were straight-up converts. However, at least most Jews I've met look mostly Mediterranean. I'm Ashkenazi myself, my grandparents came from Austria and Russia. However, I'm never mistaken for an Austrian or Russian. If people try to guess my ethnicity they usually guess something like Sicilian or Turkish, even though I don't have any relatives from either area. I obviously have not met every Jewish person on the planet though, so it's possible I've just been running into people who did not intermarry much.

I'm guessing you've never been to Israel before, because a lot of Israeli Jews are so dark-skinned and "Semitic"-looking that it's impossible to differentiate them from Israeli Arabs and Palestinians by appearance alone. Keep in mind that over half the Jewish population of Israel emigrated from North African and Middle Eastern countries.

Some of them are lighter in complexion (same with Arabs, by the way!), but whilst Ashkenazi Jews are generally fair-skinned--at least compared to Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish populations--it's usually pretty easy to pick them out of a crowd of non-Jewish Europeans. I say this as an Ashkenazi Jew--there are definitely physical characteristics associated with Jewish ancestry. I'm skipping over explaining what "Ashkenazi", "Sephardic" and "Mizrahi" means because it's already been explained in this thread.

That being said, it shouldn't come as any surprise that Jewish populations who dwelt in European regions for thousands of years might've incorporated some amount of genetic traits from the surrounding populace through interbreeding--though, for the most part, Jewish lineage has remained remarkably intact across the generations, mostly because of the strict traditional definition of "who is a Jew" (it is an ethnic identity inherited by matrilineal descent).

They don't. The Wikipedia image for the "Israelis" page captures this nicely (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/24_Israelis.png/300px-24_Israelis.png) Some look European, some don't, most are hard to place. In fact, this image understates the case since it shows famous Israelis and, due to the early politics of Israel (specifically the primarily European roots of Zionism) many of these famous Israelis tended to come from Europe. In actuality, Israelis are even more varied in appearance.TL/DR: Israel is like a box of M&Ms.

There definitely is a "Jewish look" and even an "Israeli look". It's pretty easy for me as an Israeli to tell the difference between Arab, European, and Israeli. Over 2000 years of exile there is intermarriage and some minor evolution but in the end Jews all over the world due share similar genetics like other ethnicities do.

Well a lot of the people in Israel are descendents of relatively recent migrants to that area. For a long time Jewish people were in a lot of different areas, particularly europe. According to Wikipedia:

According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2008, of Israel's 7.3 million people, 75.6 percent were Jews of any background.[2] Among them, 70.3 percent were Sabras (Israeli-born), mostly second- or third-generation Israelis, and the rest are olim (Jewish immigrants to Israel) – 20.5 percent from Europe and the Americas, and 9.2 percent from Asia and Africa, including the Arab countries.

So most israli's are jews (that's who you're talking about). Of those most have only been there for 2 or 3 generations. And a full 20% weren't born there at all.

That's not very long to appear more like the people who have been there for hundreds of years, and since jews in that area (and in many places really) tend to be more culturally isolated it's less common for there to be inter-marriages, so you get less of the gradual shift through marriage that you see in some other areas.

If the Jewish people who resettled in Israel early last century were descended from the original Jewish people who were exiled, should they not appear middle eastern? Simply living in Europe no matter for how long would not change their innate appearance except through breeding.

Here is the problem I have with Shlomo Sand. He is a professor of Modern European history, emphasis on France, writing a historical thesis on antiquity. I also have a history degree and if my emphasis is on one field it certainly does not make me one on another. Yes, it was popular in Israel precisely because it was so controversial. But you have to look at the criticism of his theories from other scholars. His work is not without critiques and they are theorie not facts.

Being Jewish is considered both a religion and an ethnicity. Majority of the Jews who set up the Israeli state were avowed Atheists or Agnostic in beliefs..having been involved in Soviet politics or Socialist backgrounds.

Europe is a geographical construct not an ethnic/color makeup. Many in southeastern europe look dark as do many in southern Spain and Southern Italy. They look remarkably different than Slavic populations/ Nordic populations in Northern Europe. You can't look " European"...you can't look " North American" can you? And before you say " well you can look Asian.." think on that for a second..Koreans, Japanese, Chinese look different from one another, and Indians sure as heck don't look like any of them.

the real question is if we all originally came from somewhere in Africa how did we "evolve" into european, middle eastern, asian, indian etc features? It certainly seems that people living closer to the equator where its hotter are darker and people further away are lighter skinned. but why the different eyes and other features?

it makes you wonder what happens if someone darker migrates to north europe or north america, will they or their descendants eventually become lighter skinned etc and probably the opposite for people migrating the other way.

There are also many jews in Africa, who look, well african. Such as in ethiopia uganda, nigeria.. there are asian jews like the kaifeng jews of chinese.. its just most americans/westerners are familiar with european jews because they migrated to America and are more well known.

Jews are a diverse group of people. There are three main types of Jewish people:

*Ashkenazi: origins in northwestern and eastern Europe *Sephardic: origins in the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) *Mizarahi: origins in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia

You are probably thinking of Ashkenazi Jews. Ashkenazi Jews have been in Europe for centuries and have intermarried with Europeans to a certain extent, which explains their appearances. But then again, Jews mostly tend to resemble their neighbors, no matter where they're from.

Israel became a country in 1948. In biblical times they went to Israel and soon after, they were forced to leave. They all dispursed through Europe and Asia and got the traits form that area. After the Holocaust i believe it was th UN who created this "safe haven" for jews so all the jews flocked back to Israel keeping their European looks. TL;DR Jews went from Israel to Europe to Israel!

the israel we know today was founded by british after the second world war and a lot of jewish people moved there, this was a dick move by brits cause they had promised the land for many islamic factions so that they would support allies in the ww 2

I'm just trying to explain that the Jewish people are no different than the Egyptians. I live in nj and all I heard throughout my education was the Holocaust. It irritates me the amount of interest we place on the Jews and how they died in the Holocaust when my ethnicity had double the losses during it. How about the Slavs, the gypsies, the Armenians, and other ethnicities that died in mass extinctions in the past 200 hundred s of years. Not interesting enough to find out where they come from? You have a legit question but I'm just tired of hearing about Jews all the time.

too bad it irritates you. I bet when black people talk about the social inequality they experience today you tell them 'I'm so tired about hearing about the injustices leftover from slavery.' you're an idiot and you deserve to feel like one.

Personally I don't see what difference it makes whether Ashkenazis were descended from Khazars or not. But given the common matrilineal tracing of Judaic heritage and the focus on one having to generally be born Jewish to be considered as such (and Jewish parents wanting their kids to marry other Jews to maintain the bloodlines), it seems unlikely that practically all of the Arabic (Sephardic) Jews of the Diaspora turned into white European Ashkenazis. Then again a lot can happen in 2000 years.

You're using Jewish and Israeli interchangeably. Many people do that. No offense is taken. Biblical stories won't capture the location of every Jewish settlement in Europe, Asia and Africa. But before asking a question like this, you must understand there is a difference. I'm not reading between the lines, I'm just using what you've said as a basis on a common assumption by people.

Not always the most reliable source. However I've just done a quick google search and I'm getting wildly different figures some as high as 60 million (I'm not sure there were that many to start with). Would be good if we could find a reliable source.

But one thing I don't understand is, how can Ashkenazi and Sephardi be "True Jews" even though they appear to have no direct bloodline to Palestine. And furthermore how could Palestinians not be considered "True Jews" even though they are the most direct bloodline relatives of the patriarchs and even Jesus?

Bestselling doesn't make it correct. I studied History as well and his theories ( yes they are theories not facts) are disputed IN Israel by critics and outside Israel by critics. His work is not without controversy. He is also not an expert in antiquity but in Modern European history, which in the history field is like having someone who is an expert in criminal law discuss tax law.

He is also not an expert in antiquity but in Modern European history, which in the history field is like having someone who is an expert in criminal law discuss tax law.

His expertise is irrelevant. I understand the theological and political desire to defend Israel as the historic homeland of the Jews, but there is no need to stoop to attacking the messenger. It doesn't support your argument, and makes you look desperate.

The fact is, there is little evidence that the Jewish people have a common origin and didn't consist of mostly converts like the Christians and Muslims. Absent reason to believe otherwise, the assumption should be that they're like other peoples in this respect.

Yeah but aren't Jews really just Egyptians who believed in monotheism? I remember some articles explaining the linguistical similarities between ancient Egyptian languages and Semite languages. Just for your information Farsi (persian) and Hebrew are both Semitic languages.

No they are not. They came to egypt after the famine.. they were a totally different people/ethnicity. there are lots of linguistic similarities between many languages in that region. even today you see the similarities between hebrew and arabic.